in this video we're going to explore animal studies of attachment at points this video is going to be rather cute but at other points it might just make you cry now let's put a monkey into the room [Music] hey everyone welcome back to parity mind in trying to understand attachment researchers have conducted animal studies to learn about the relationship between a mother and her infant there are two researchers we're going to consider Conrad Lorenz and Harry Harlow to findings from their research have shown the importance of forming an attachment in the early stages of life and the potential consequences if you don't form an attachment foreign Lorenz was a zoologist from Austria and as part of his research he studied gray-like geese and a process called imprinting imprinting is a process in Birds where they form an attachment to the first thing they see upon hatching it's an instinctive process where the newborn will go on to follow someone they recognize or have marked as their mother Conrad Lorenz devised a classic experiment where he randomly divided a large clutch of gray like goose eggs into two groups the first group of eggs hatch naturally with their mother they were the control group the other group of eggs hatched in an incubator away from their mother and they were the experimental group importantly the first moving object they encountered when they hatched was Lorenz himself each Gosling was then Mark so that Lorenz could identify which would hatch naturally and which in the incubator he then recorded the behavior of the goslings he placed them under an upturn box and when the box was removed he found that the naturally hatch goslings followed their mother whereas the incubated goslings amazingly followed Lorenz and this Behavior proved irreversible wherever Lorenz when the goslings went too foreign [Music] ly for our discussion and attachment there are two key takeaways from this research firstly it suggests that the formation of an attachment has an instinctive survival component to it the geese didn't have to learn the skill of imprinting it was something they naturally did they looked for a mother figure who would care for and protect them secondly Lorenz found that there was a critical period in which the imprinting would take place in other words there was a window of opportunity for the attachment to form and if they did not imprint within that critical period an attachment would not fall researchers suggested that the most likely time for imprinting to occur is approximately between 12 and 17 hours with them needing to imprint by approximately 30 hours foreign his research with monkeys has been described as unethical and cruel however they did discover important truths about attachment that shaped the way we understand Child Development today at the time of Harlow's research in the 1950s one of the most dominant views in Psychology was that of behaviorism with the work of John Watson Ivan Pavlov and BF Skinner the following words of Joan Watson typified the behaviorist View at the time when it came to Parenting do not overindulge them do not kiss them good night rather give a brief bow and shake their hand before turning off the light when it came to attachment Behavior behaviorists took the view that babies formed an attachment with their mother simply because the mother provided food Harlow didn't like that idea he argued that this missed something crucially important to the formation of a relationship and to healthy development in a child and that was love although I'm not sure how loving his research was Harlow studied rhesus monkeys and removed them from their mothers at Birth and raised in isolation using a controlled environment the monkeys were then released into a cage where they had the choice of two surrogate monkey mothers surrogate being a substitute mother one of these surrogate mothers was made from a block of wood covered with sponge Rubber and a cotton cloth this is a cloth method it is only a wire mother with a cloth covered a light bulb behind her radiated heat this surrogate will have provided what Hollow called contact Comfort the other surrogate mother was made of wire mesh which dispense food from a bottle placed in a similar location to the way a real monkey mother would when the monkeys were released into the cage with these two surrogate mothers they recorded the amount of time the monkey spent with each of the mothers here's what they found given a choice between a mother that provided food but not Comfort or a mother that provided contact Comfort but no food the monkey chose contact Comfort he's back on the cloth mother and he'll stay on the cloth mother actually this baby spends 17 to 18 hours a day on the cloth mother and less than one hour a day on The Wire mother in another version of his research Harlow explored fear he argued that one function of the mother is to be a place of Safety and Security for the infant in times of fear and danger and that an infant responds to fear can be a measure of the strength of the attachment to their mother they tested this idea by presenting various fear-producing stimuli such as a noise-making teddy bear to the monkeys however this was also an object that Harlow used to induce fear in their monkeys this is the apparatus we use and looks diabolical that's just the way the baby monkey feels about it lacing eyes loud sound moving mechanical Parts all of these things are designed to frighten a monkey sometimes the monkey was alone in the cage without any surrogate mother and in other conditions the monkey was with the wire and cloths surrogate mothers to see who they would choose they found that when they were alone without a mother they would Crouch down in fear and avoid the object but when the surrogate mothers were there they looked to the contact Comfort mother for safety and did not show as much of a fearful response and in fact eventually began to explore and attack the object Howl's experiments suggests that we have a need for contact Comfort a place of security and safety that acts as a base for us to explore the world and cope with the unknown and sometimes fearful things we may encounter in addition to these results Harlow also recorded the behaviors of the monkeys in the long term in 1971 Harlow and another psychologist reported on research on the isolation of real had monkeys and in particular female rhesus monkeys who've been raised themselves without her mother I'm quoting directly from the study here we have called them motherless mothers since they never experienced Mother Love not any other kind of monkey affection themselves most of the motherless mothers either completely ignored or abused their initial Offspring most of the motherless mothers continue to be inadequate brutal are lethal mothers to subsequent Offspring what Harlow and his research found was that the long-term effects of not having formed an attachment of not forming a bond with a caregiver in this case a mother monkey caused significant damage they reported that the monkeys lacked skills in how to be social and interact often being timid and not knowing how to behave around other monkeys and as we just saw the motherless monkeys that became mothers themselves were inadequate mothers they lacked a model an example of how to be caring nurturing and comforting to their own children because they had never experienced that themselves in summary Harlow's research demonstrated several key findings relating to the importance of early attachments number one contact Comfort is more important than food when it comes to forming an attachment number two a secure base is needed to help them explore and be a place of safety in times of fear number three there are long-term effects to not forming an attachment and four there's a critical period from Harlow's research it will suggest you that the critical period for the monkeys the time by which an attachment needs to be formed was around 90 days the impact of being deprived of modely care called maternal deprivation more on that in a future video could be reversed in monkeys but only if it had lasted less than 90 days if no attachment had been formed by then that's when the law long-term effects were irreversible foreign now let's critically consider the use of animal studies to study human attachment firstly there are implications for theories of attachment from the animal studies one explanation for the formation of attachment is bolby's monotropic Theory the research findings of Lorenz and Harlow point to some of the features in this theory for example bolby's Theory includes how attachments are adaptive the idea that the formation of attachments is an instinctive behavior that helps promote survival the geese didn't need to learn to imprint they automatically did it additionally bolby's Theory also contains the idea of the critical period which Lorenz in the geese and hallowed the monkeys both mention as a key Concept in the formation of attachments additionally another theory of attachment is called learning theory based on behaviorism this is based on the idea that attachments are learned with attachments being formed because the mother provides food however Harlow's research challenges this idea because given the choice between contact Comfort and food the monkeys placed higher importance on contact comfort as a result we can see the value in animal study research because their findings have provided the foundation for theories to help explain the formation of human attachments another benefit of these animal studies is the Practical value of the research for various jobs and professions for example Harlow's research demonstrates the harm that early neglect can have having a poor attachment in childhood can have long-term consequences for future relationships and has drawn attention to the importance of these early years of life this is vitally important for social workers who can use these insights to identify potential risk factors in vulnerable children so that support and intervention can be put in place for them this could be to do with preventing early neglect that has been identified in a home or if they know this has happened in the past to help and support a child develop and progress from the poor attachment they experienced earlier in life however one of the problems that we need to talk about is the issue of studying animals to learn about human behavior this is because it's unlikely that observations of goslings following a researcher are rhesus monkeys clinging to cloth covered wire models reflects the emotional Connections in interaction that characterizes human attachments in fact some researchers have argued that the idea of the critical period seen in the work of both Lorenzen hallow is more of a sensitive period in humans Studies have demonstrated how children have been able to recover from early deprivation from a caregiver for more on this check out the video on the Romanian orphans that I'll link in the description below as a result this limits our understanding because the findings from animal studies can be argued to be hard to generalize to human attachment finally we can't finish our discussion on animal studies without considering the ethical issues it goes without saying that much of the research conducted on animals in order to learn about attachment Behavior especially the work of Harry Halo has been heavily criticized for the unethical way the research was carried out and the harm caused to the monkeys for example removing monkeys from their mothers at Birth is extremely damaging and cruel deliberately frightening monkeys with mechanical objects they wouldn't normally see is Highly Questionable and raising monkeys in isolation from other monkeys reads like torture he wrote the effects of six months of total social isolation were so devastating and debilitating that we had assumed initially that 12 months of isolation would not produce any additional decrement this assumption proved to be false 12 months of isolation almost obliterated the animals socially now you need to be very careful when writing about ethical issues in the exam because many students make the mistake of Simply describing what the issues are and just saying it's wrong however you need to bear in mind that for the purpose of this part of the air level course into attachment the purpose of animal studies is to learn about human attachments and so if you want to make the ethical issues criticism you must make your reality Point relate to human attachment otherwise you'll score no marks so many students write something like therefore animal studies can be criticized because they're unethical and it's wrong to cause such harm to the animals but what you need to add is a reference to human attachment so you could write something quite simple like this therefore it could be argued that it's unethical to cause harm to animals in research for the purposes of learning about human attachment for more on the work of Harry Howell you might want to check out this book opening Skinner's box where chapter 6 explores his work in more detail I've linked it below for you in the description too in the next videos we're going to explore the two explanations for attachment we briefly mentioned in this video learning theory and bolby's monotropic theory and the great news is we'll be able to use our knowledge of the animal studies from this video to help us out with that to watch that click the video on the screen now I hope you found this video helpful full and we'll see you in the next one